Extreme Welsh Meter

Imagine that the most popular show on your NPR radio station was a poetry competition, with local teams fighting to win a national trophy. Each poet’s given a subject and a meter, then invited to leave for twenty minutes to compose his or her offering. In the interval, the judge entertains the packed hall with anecdotes about poetry and examples of the participants’ past work from memory. The emphasis is on enjoyment and the laughter is often raucous. This is a description of the most-listened-to show now on Radio Cymru, the BBC’s Welsh-language radio service. The meters in which the poets are expected to compete make a villanelle look like free verse.

Cynghanedd (literally, “chiming”) developed in fourteenth-century Wales and grew out of a combination of the French troubadour measures and a Celtic love of intricate ornament for its own sake. American readers may have come across the idea of these complex Welsh forms in books like Miller Williams’s Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms and Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. W.H. Auden used to recommend that young poets compose Welsh stanzas, like the three-line englyn, for technical practice. Mind you, he once told a friend’s mother that an intelligent woman should never be seen without a typewriter. Compared with free verse, the Welsh meters are an extreme sport, like kitesurfing set alongside paddling.
So, why should anybody care about this arcane branch of contemporary poetry? Because it keeps cropping up in the most unexpected places. Take, for example, the opening of an Ange Mlinko poem published recently in The Poetry Review:

Injurious oranges, that is, mildewed on the ground,
you don’t make winter any less sad after all,
not even in a climate that supports citrus.
— From Seasonal Disorder

In poetry we hear shapes. The sound pattern in the first two words makes you hear the oranges as whole fruit, before they fall from the tree, begin to rot, and lose their integrity. If I map out the clusters of consonants in relation to the main beats, we can see Mlinko’s 
describing the two oranges:

Injurious oranges
j´rs           ´rngs

The correspondence isn’t perfect but, because j and g sound the same, the pattern’s distinct enough for us to get a sense of the complete 
oranges before they deliquesce into the ground. So, here’s a contemporary American poet using a medieval Welsh metrical trick as a central tool of her exploration of language as it looks, puzzled, at the world. In this article I want to explore where that distinctive sound came from and what it can tell us about poetry in relation to the world.

Cynghanedd (pronounced kung-han-eth and, indeed, it is a kind of kung-fu) is a form of patterning of consonants, accents, and rhyme that has been present in Welsh-language poetry since the sixth century. 
In Anglo-Saxon verse the line can be divided in two, with corresponding consonants on each side of the break. Here are lines from Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney and mentioned for their alliteration in his introduction to the poem:

The fórtunes of wár          fávoured Hróthgar (l. 64)
the híghest in the lánd,    would lénd advíce (l. 172)
and fínd fríendship           in the Fáther’s embráce (l. 188)

The Welsh tradition makes this patterning even more complex by insisting that the sequence of consonants in one half of the line follows the order in the other. This includes getting the accents in the right place. Here’s an example from a thirteenth-century elegy for the last Prince of Wales, whose death in 1282 meant the end of Wales as an independent country. Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch (Griffith son of the Red Abbot) writes (with my accents):

Poni welwch-chi hynt/y gwynt / a’r gláw?
Poni welwch-chi’r déri’n/ymdáraw?
 ............................................
Poni welch-chi’r gwír/yn ymgywéiriaw?

Don’t you see the course of the wind and the rain?
Don’t you see the oaks clashing?  
  .......................................
Don’t you see the truth being tuned?

In the first line, the rhyming and chiming between the weather and the writing suggests that even though the world sounds chaotic, its dissonances are part of arriving at a poetic truth. The consonantal repetition in the second and third lines are like the piano tuner’s obsessive intervals, moving closer and closer to making the instrument fit to play a beautiful lament. Nature and politics are part of the same song, only poetry can make it audible.

From the thirteenth century onwards, cynghanedd developed from being an occasional poetic effect to being codified into four types, of varying complexity. Thick handbooks detailing permitted and doubtful combinations of sounds are published. For example, there is one flaw in rhyme, which is called “bai rhy debyg,” the fault of  being too alike. If you’d like to know more, Mererid Hopwood has written a useful introduction in English, Singing in Chains: Listening to Welsh Verse (2004), which contains examples of headlines in English-language newspapers and adverts using cynghanedd. Waldo Williams, one of the great twentieth-century lyricists in Welsh once wrote an englyn in English for fun:

On my own. Oh! I manage — I prepare
             A repast with courage.
    I live, active for my age,
    In a cute little cottage.

Williams, who was a Quaker and pacifist, saw poetry as “an extension of the light which put the world together    ...    I felt an unreasonable unity between the thing and the name.” He here draws attention to the theology of intricate sound patterns. If words in various combinations make music then one might infer that those objects to which words refer are also interrelated. This holds for end rhymes, such as the famous womb/tomb or wind/mind combinations and also for more subtle echoes within a poetic line. Going back to the elegy for the Prince of Wales, if “gwir” (the truth) and “ymgyweiriaw” (tuning) share sounds then they’re also mutually implicated in the world.

Writing about Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes draws attention to her “slow, small meter, a device for bringing each syllable into close-up, as under a microscope.” This applies even more to lines with complex echoing effects. It’s impossible to read them quickly because the sheer number of consonants forces your mouth to take its time articulating each letter, much like talking with toffee in your teeth. I’ve recently discovered a wonderful late medieval poem online, describing dolphins sporting in waves. Its author, Thomas Prys (1564?–1634), had seen this sight many times because he was a buccaneer during the reign of Elizabeth I and helped repel the Spanish Armada when it tried to invade the British Isles. The poet addresses the dolphin:

Yr ydwyt yn aredig
y tonnau brau yn eu brig,
y môr hallt yma a hollti,
eigion y don a fyn di.
Ysgod glew yw’r esgud glân,
ysgwl môr, ysgil marian;
gwiber dwfr ymgeibia’r don,
golwg a ofna galon.
Torwyn wyd, tirion odiaeth,
tramwywr y cefnddwr caeth;
twrch heli, taer uchelwaith,
treigla’r môr, tro eglur maith.
— From Y Llamhidydd


Here you are at your ploughing,
Fragile wavetops breaking,
Turning water as you till
Salt waves, wherever you will.
You are land’s swift shadow,
Sea predator in the shallows;
Digging the waves, sea’s viper,
You strike at the heart with fear.
Turning the spray so tenderly,
Treader of the captive bay;
Ocean’s hog, you leap up high,
Shedding sea, seen from far away.
— From The Dolphin

In this long cywydd — a seven-syllable couplet rhyming alternatively on an accented and unaccented end word — he uses the technique of dyfalu (“guessing”). Even though the answer — dolphin — is already known, fanciful terms are accumulated in order to defamiliarize the object. The poem’s over a hundred lines long and its wildly inventive sequence of metaphors gives us glimpses of the dolphin swimming through the lines, as it does through the waves, always tantalizingly 
out of reach. The lines beat regularly like the ping of sonar on a contemporary boat’s fish-finder. The cywydd form works like radar 
before radar was even invented and, ironically, mimics the echolocation used by dolphins themselves.

To writers who are familiar with the free verse tradition only, this degree of metrical complexity must appear bewildering. In order to qualify as a licensed bard in the fourteenth century, an apprentice had to show mastery of twenty-four such forms and undertake a nine-year qualification — quite a lengthy MFA. Once licensed, the bard traveled around the courts of the nobility and asked for patronage. Ordinary people wrote poems and songs as well, but the ability to handle the twenty-four meters with ease marked you out as educated and, therefore, one of the elite. A rare female writing in these meters was the fifteenth-century Gwerful Mechain, who composed an ode to the vulva, possibly in answer to Dafydd ap Gwilym’s comic eulogy to his penis. Cynghanedd is an excellent mnemonic device. If you can’t remember the second half of a given line, all you have to do is fit in the words needed according to the pattern in the first half.

The psychological reasons for this artistic compulsion are more difficult to pin down. In reordering the world by the means of language, the poet was mimicking God’s work as creator. Any combination, 
however fanciful, can be a way of praising God because there’s no part of the verbal and actual universe that could be untangled from His being. Just like the fancy work in the Book of Kells, there was nothing too intricate to speak of the endless, abstract patterns of sanctity. This is all very positive, but I do also detect an element of anxiety in these obsessive reformulations. This was the time of the Black Plague, which killed millions in Europe, including, perhaps, the great medieval nature poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. In the face of such a pandemic, complex poetical games were a useful displacement activity. There is, I feel, a big clue in a comment made by John Ruskin in relation to the visual arts:

The more beautiful the art, the more it is essentially the work of people who feel themselves wrong; — who are striving for the fulfillment of a law, and the grasp of a loveliness, which they have not yet attained, which they feel even farther and farther from attaining, the more they strive for it.

However ingenious, man’s formulations of the complex world are always inadequate. No sooner are they completed than they need to be re-drawn. The sheer busyness of these medieval poems make them feel as if they come from a universe closer, artistically, to a linguistic Big Bang when sounds and images were more intimate with each other, and the idea of  having a larger space between them had not yet occurred to artists and writers. Think of the matter-filled universes of Fra Angelico, as opposed to the cooler spaces of the slightly later Piero della Francesca. The complex meters hold this dense, earlier universe together like dark matter. We can also read the minute details as a fractal account of infinity where, no matter on how small a scale we look at the universe, further vistas of patterns reveal themselves. Welsh is one of the earlier Indo-European languages. When a Sanskrit scholar heard me recite some Welsh verses, she commented that they reminded her of the sound of Sanskrit — a most intriguing connection.

Welsh poetics have an unlikely and prominent place in the modernist tradition. While he was a student in late-nineteenth-century Oxford, Gerard Manley Hopkins was in the habit of making word lists based on the same sounds. For example:

Grind, gride, gird, grit, groat, grate, greet    ...

Greet, grief, wearing, tribulation. Grief possibly connected. Gruff, with a sound as of two things rubbing together. I believe these words to be onomatopoetic. Gr common to them all representing a particular sound. In fact I think the onomatopoetic theory has not had a fair chance. Cf. Crack, creak, croak, crake, graculus, crackle. These must be onomatopoetic.

Hopkins spent some of the happiest times of his Jesuit novitiate in St Beuno’s College in the hills of North Wales. He wrote to his mother that he’d always regarded himself as half-Welsh and that he was taking lessons in the language from a Miss Susannah Jones. Together they translated Cinderella. Hopkins wrote a Welsh poem in perfect strict meter at the time he was working on “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” a mini metrical maquette of the elegy. Hopkins imported cynghanedd into his English-language poetry, like this example in “The Sea and the Skylark”: “Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend.”

When he came to write his great elegy “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Hopkins chose accents as the main structuring principle for his lines, rather than the syllabics of Welsh poetics, but he relied heavily on a loose cynghanedd system. Toward the end of the poem he writes: “Now burn, new born to the world.” Hopkins is taking the order of the world apart and finding the hidden sonic principles (his poetic signature for God) to show the divine will operating in the shipwreck. He examines the same question of God’s part in the world in “To What Serves Mortal Beauty?”:

What do then? how meet beauty? | Merely meet it; own,
Home at heart, heaven’s sweet gift; | then leave, let that alone.
Yea, wish that though, wish all, | God’s better beauty, grace.

Here Hopkins has used a rough version of the seven-syllable cywydd couplets (with the second lines six syllables, a different layout and no end rhymes.) Chiming is still there, though, between the first and second lines here quoted:

own, / 
Hóme / at heárt

It’s like an under-melody to the overt subject of the poem; it’s the rhythm of “God’s better beauty, grace.” Elizabeth Bishop responded strongly to Hopkins’s use of a supranatural mimesis behind human grammar. In a letter she linked Baroque prose with Hopkins’s work:

But the best part, which perfectly describes the sort of poetic convention I should like to make for myself (and which explains, I think, something of Hopkins), is this: “Their purpose (the writers of Baroque prose) was to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking.”

Bishop goes on to divide poetry into two types:

The “at rest” sort occupying properly almost the entire history 
and field of poetry. Only Donne occasionally, a few stray 
poems in his century, and Hopkins have done the kind of thing I mean — yes, and strange to say sometimes Chatterton.

So, here we have the medieval Welsh meters traveling through a nineteenth-century monk and into mainstream American poetry. Bishop’s friend Marianne Moore used syllabics and, in poems like “Enough,” used the cywydd pattern:

Some in the Godspeed, the Susan C.,
others in the Discovery,

found their too earthly paradise,
a paradise in which hope dies,

found pests and pestilence instead,
the living outnumbered by the dead.

This is not to mention Robert Graves, whose White Goddess gives a credible account of early Welsh mythology. The dedicatory poem to the Goddess which opens the book uses several Welsh techniques, including the matching of masculine with feminine rhymes (know/echo) and proest (men/mean), in which consonants stay the same but the vowels in the rhyme word mutate:

All saints revile her, and all sober men
Ruled by the God Apollo’s golden mean — 
In scorn of which I sailed to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom I desired above all things to know,
Sister of the mirage and echo.
— From In Dedication

Wilfred Owen, who also fought in WWI, used proest to great effect in “Strange Meeting.”

Cynghanedd played an unlikely starring role in mid-twentieth-century modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. Dylan Thomas 
refused the idea that poetry was about anything but the event created by words themselves. His parents and extended family were Welsh speakers and he exploited the clotted sound of the cynghanedd to create his dramas of the WWII self. The last poem Thomas wrote, the “Prologue” to the Dent edition of his Collected Poems, uses a loose cywydd form and touches of cynghanedd (“dark shoals every holy field”). Thomas is as intent as Hopkins on showing a hidden order to the world, except it’s a nihilism masked by religious language rather than the unlikely harmony celebrated by Hopkins.

Basil Bunting, who lived in the North East of England, where Welsh had been spoken in the sixth century, researched the Welsh meters, using them in his musical masterpiece Briggflatts, first published in Poetry in 1966. For Bunting, “the sound of the words spoken aloud is itself the meaning” of a poem. Describing winter, Bunting uses both cynghanedd and proest to slow the tongue’s movement in the mouth, suggesting how speech thickens in extreme cold:

Even a bangle of  birds
to bind sleeve to wrist
as west wind waves to east
a just perceptible greeting — 
sinews ripple the weave,
threads flex, slew, hues meeting,
parting in whey-blue haze.

Bunting piles on complexity — “threads flex, slew, hues meeting” — 
suggesting the infinite regress of fractals. There was no reason for Bunting to conform to the exact rules of Welsh prosody; he was interested in broadening the principle:

Cynghanedd is of course all the things that hold poetry together by way of sound; various kinds of rhyme, real ordinary rhyme we are used to, the peculiar rhyme the Welsh like, when you come to the rhyme word and it doesn’t rhyme but the next word rhymes instead, or when a rhyme goes in the middle of the next line, or the end of the line rhymes with the middle of the line before. And they like rhymes that don’t have the same vowel, only the same consonants each side of it, and funny things like that, and a tremendous variety of possibilities in the alliteration and so on.

So enthusiastic was Bunting about the Welsh meters that he wrote at length about them to his friend Louis Zukofsky. In a key section of “A”-8 Zukofsky exploited the mathematical principle of cynghanedd using, for example, the sounds r and s to help structure these lines:

De massa run, ha! ha! De darkey stay, ho! ho!
So distribution should undo excess — (chaseth),
Shall brothers be, be a’ that, Child, lolai, lullow.

Given that cynghanedd itself came out of the encounter between troubadour and Welsh poetry, it should be regarded as part of the European sources that were so influential for Pound and his successors.

Writing in the fourteenth century, Dafydd ap Gwilym could see no difference between birdsong and poetry, as both use repetitions with variation. Perhaps it would be more accurate now to describe meter as an equivalent of a bird’s call and poetry itself as improvisation. Now Welsh-language poets post cynghanedd online in tweets, Twitter being the perfect size for this ancient/modern meter. Of all modern poets, though, it’s the Australian Les Murray — who spent some time living in Wales — who’s come closest to catching how the technique sounds in English and what its theological purpose is. In “Bats’ Ultrasound,” Murray parodies a Welsh englyn — “Oer yw’r eira yn Eryri” (The snow in Snowdonia is cold”) — and ascribes the sound to bats:

ah eyrie-ire; aero hour, eh?
O’er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array,
err, yaw, row wry — aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.

This poem restores the religious aspect of medieval Welsh poetry, seeing the syllables as an orrery (a model of the cosmos) and, ultimately, as a name for God. He exposes the deep theology behind the sound of poetry — whether you believe in logos and its music or not.